History

History is Fun

Friday, December 5, 2014

A Little Battle of Britain CY-6

The good old rules on the table

I know it has been a while but I am back!
This past Wednesday I had a chance to play CY-6 at the club with Soren. We played a quick game just two airplanes each. I had two German Me-109E-4's and Soren had two British Spitfires that he painted. The Me-109 are some of the first WWII aircraft I painted.

Quick reference sheet my modified aircraft sheet

my old Me-109's with the new flight stands the new stands add the third dimension to the game

Soren's awesome paint job on his Spitfires

The game was fun and we had a fun time. We started off on opposite sides of the board and we came head on. Soren split up his two planes and I kept my Me-109's in formation to maximize firepower and hopefully protect my planes from being hit from behind.

Flying head on

Our first pass and no one was hit, we just flew past each other

I flew straight at Sorens one plane while he flew around my flank with the other plane. I had to decide if I should turn and attack Soren's plan that I had engaged or to fly after the other plane. I chose to go after his flanking plane. This was smart as Soren made a hard turn with his first plane and would have hit me from two directions at once,but because I got some distance from the first plane Soren was out of position to hit me from both sides.

The situation after I decided to go after plane number two

Closing in on the second plane, me an my wing man

Soren drew first blood and one of my planes received some airframe damage. I was able to hit Soren with both my planes and the Low Velocity Cannon's were very powerful. I was able to score a solid engine hit on Soren's Spitfire.

I had to use a red dice to indicate airframe damage since I did not have smoke markers

You can see a red dice on my plane and a black dice on Soren's to indicate the engine damage from my LVC's.

After hitting Soren I had to make another choice, either continue after Soren's damaged plane or engage the new undamaged plane. I decided to stay together with my wing man and go after the damaged Spitfire and I was able to score a second hit on his plane and the first plane wend down in flames. But I then turned into Sorens guns and he fired on my damaged plane.

Soren dives for the deck hoping to get away

I drop down and get on Soren's six, he was checking his six but it was of no use

Splash on British Spitfire

A view from the top showing the tactical picture

Soren was able to take out my damaged Me-109 near where I shot down Soren's Spitfire. Soren had the position advantage and I had to start to maneuver to keep him from shooting down my last plane. We started the phase we called the dance.

I knew I was in a bad spot so I had to gain speed and turn for the deck to try to shake Soren

Me trying to escape

The dance started with me trying to maneuver and turn around but Soren was a step ahead of me and we both made a special maneuver and we continued to turn and dive for the deck.

After our maneuvers we were both parallel to each other and the only advantage I had was that I was moving at a faster speed than Soren

We continued to lose altitude and maneuver to try and line up a shot on each other

I finally go ahead of Soren and turned in for another attack, I was not able to get a hit on Soren

My plane to get in front of Soren but it ended up that we ended a turn in the same hex. We had to roll for a collision avoidance. I failed the roll but Soren passed, he had a chance to avoid collision but he desired to ram my plane with his. Things turned upside down at this point.

The situation when we ended up in the same hex we were both low and slow from heading for the deck

The air battle did not take us far from the site where we both lost our first planes

Soren was the first to roll on the likely hit chart and he rolled a snake eyes which is a result of: plane crash and pilot dies. I was next to roll on the same chart and the odds were against me and I rolled the same exact roll snake eyes. So both of our planes crash and we both go up inflames.

We had a fun game and things turned out very different than we both expected. I hope you enjoyed the AAR and if you have never played CY-6 get a copy and try it out and have some fun!

6 comments:

Great AAR covering a really fun game. It really felt like we touched on the essence of CY6, because each move was like a Chess game, just trying to anticipate the adversary and getting into position based on that guess. I really think these rules hold top quality. Thanks for setting up the game Mark, and a nice weekend to you too!

Yes it is a good game and there are a lot to think about when you are flying! It is a 3D chess game with guns! I just happened to have some High Velocity Cannons too:-)I found some of my 1:300 WWII planes that I thought I had lost in the move from the U.S.A. but I found them, there is one more Me-262, and a number of Polish aircraft form 1939 so we will have even more types of aircraft to use in future CY-6 games.I am looking forward to our next game!

Hi Mattias, Yes the game is fun and there are a lot of tactical challenges to consider. The game becomes difficult to play with more than a handful of aircraft per person to manage. The game was designed for small to large combat missions. I was in contact with author when they were finishing up the rules back in 2007. If you are interested in WWII air combat these are the rules to get as you can play after painting one aircraft for each side.Thanks for checking out my blog!

Great game, thanks for posting. I really like the painting of your aircraft--the panel lines are distinct but don't overwhelm the rest of the painting.

CY6 is a fantastic system. Some of my first games with it were also with Battle of Britain stuff.

I feel that the game plays well with multiple aircraft per player---my uncle and I played through one of the 8th Air Force book campaigns (about 9 games with 6+ "active" aircraft per side) in a long weekend a couple years ago. One of the best gaming experiences I've ever had.

Hi Nathaniel,Thanks for stopping by and checking out the game. It is a fun system and I have played a number of games but I have not done any big games with heavy bombers. The first time I had bombers in one of my games was when we did a Winter War game here in Stockholm. There were only two Finish Bombers but it was good to try out the defensive fire from the bombers against the Soviet fighters.Have a good week.